Marketing and project management links

The importance of Project Management

During the past few months I have had the good fortune to spend some time with clever people who operate businesses in the marketing space. One way or the other they cover every aspect of marketing in all forms including the ubiquitous "social media" component.

Always eager to learn I asked many question and gained some valuable insights into the core of their activities. I was amazed at the complexity of the work they do and the number of different moving parts they have to track and manage.

This is when it got interesting. Having picked their brains about what they do I ended up asking them how they manage what amounts to complex projects and what they perceived as the major obstacles in delivering these project successfully.

The common thread was that they mostly agreed that they did a bit of Project management but had no need for a person who is only a project manager, later I found out why. They explained the platforms they use to communicate within the team and all manner of other clever bits of software.

They acknowledged that at least one person was nominally in charge of the work and they even called it a project with the main responsibility to co-ordinate  tasks.

Their main problems, as they explained them to me, covered the usual :

• Lack of confirmed clarity of scope,
• Frequent changes,
• Having to "educate" their clients about the work they were doing,
• No simple way to resolve any disagreements,
• The knock-on effect of changed requirements, as a result of client requested change.

Uniformly they were almost completely ignorant of the basics of Project Management.

The next revelation was even more astonishing.
It appears that some of them understand the value of project management but clients refuse to pay for it as a separate service and expect the marketing team to "manage" the project as part of the project.

Business managers must learn that many activities within their businesses should be run as proper projects with a qualified Project manager in charge. The cost of not learning this lesson will always impact the bottom line negatively.

The cost of ignorance is always to somebody's account.